New female Dwarf renders added

New female Dwarf renders were just added to the Warlords site, showing new hairstyles and some model changes

Reaper of Souls awards Hearthstone packs

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Heads up! Players who pick up a copy of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls™ will soon discover bonus loot in the form of an Expert Card Pack (or Packs!) for Hearthstone™: Heroes of Warcraft™.
Depending on the version of Reaper of Souls you have pre-purchased (or purchase in the future) you can expect the following:

Note: These Expert Card Packs require a Battle.net account to be redeemed, and a maximum of five bonus Expert Card Packs can be redeemed on a single Battle.net account. If you aren't already playing Hearthstone when the bonus Expert Card Pack keys are granted to your Battle.net account, don’t worry—they’ll be waiting for you in-game as soon as you download Hearthstone for FREE and get through the introductory missions.
So have fun in Reaper of Souls, proudly defend the mortal realms, and—when you're ready for your hero's respite—enjoy some free cards courtesy of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Talk Azeroth 31

In this week's show Olivia's answering your questions: Is cross-realm raiding destroying guilds? (0:40) Is flex causing raid burnout? (6:40) What should a tank do and how do I do it? (17:18)

Click the link below to read more!

Health Scaling changes explained

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I know healer scaling was mentioned, but what about damage scaling? It has just gotten absurd how quickly damage scaled in MOP - we went from doing 60k dps to 400k+, which is why Battle Fatigue and PVP Resilience had to be set so high in the first place.

You need to hit the root of the problem NOW while you are doing the item squish - if you wait until after WOD then it will be too late and you'll have to do an item squish again for the next expansion.

So, there's actually a lot going on there:

Currently, in Mists, level 90 characters have a relatively high amount of base health, and a relatively low amount of base damage or healing on their abilities. As a result, your health from Stamina doesn't increase as quickly as your damage or healing from Attack or Spell Power. To use some made up numbers for perspective, your gear might account for 80-90% of your damage, but only 40-50% of your health. That's why, as the quality of your gear increases by hundreds of item levels over the course of an expansion, we see such a high swing in damage output compared to health pools.

For Warlords, we're simplifying that by making health and spell effectiveness scale a lot more linearly. Base health is being lowered dramatically (and the effectiveness of Stamina increased) to the point that as damage or healing goes up, health pools go up alongside them. That lets us ensure that PvP gameplay at low gear vs high gear feels relatively similar.

On top of that, we're increasing health pools in general -- they'll be much larger in comparison to the damage players are able to deal to each other than they are today. Resilience and Battle Fatigue were added because without them, an attack or heal would account for massive chunks of a player's health bar. With higher health, that same spell doesn't have as big of an impact.

(It's worth noting that all of this is after the item squish, so it's all relative. The actual numbers, including health pools, will end up much smaller compared to how things are today.)

Heroes of the Storm Dev Q&A

Yesterday saw the Heroes of the Storm Developer Q&A, focusing on talents. The on-demand video is below, as well as a few key points from the Q&A:

Some Heroes definitely need additional balancing and tuning, Uther being the one mentioned

Their initial thought of more simplistic, universal talents didn't work out as heroes have specific abilities that would be too strong or weak when modified

They want Hero builds to be flexible, but see no problem in, for example, a Demon Hunter not being able to play support

The current system gives Heroes build options, but the base types will remain intact.

The UI is being worked on for talents, allowing players to keybind talent selection

When the UI was open, although the developers didn't mention it, there was an "enable auto-pick" check box visible.

The devs feel that the game is easy to learn, but similarly to Hearthstone, has a lot of depth

The devs feel that there is sufficient talent flexibility, without departing too much from the Heroes' original purpose

Social systems are being worked on and will be added to the game as they are completed

Cross-Realm Raiding enabled Worldwide

Cross-Realm Heroic and Normal mode raiding are now enabled worldwide, following Rygarius' blue post. EU Community Manager Takralus put together a helpful summary of how the new system will affect realm firsts and the like:

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We’ve recently implemented an often requested feature to enable cross-realm raiding for Siege of Orgrimmar. Cross-realm BattleTag™ and Real ID friends can now raid together and take the fight to Garrosh on Normal or Heroic difficulty. Players will be able to earn greater rewards such as Reins of the Kor'kron War Wolf or the title of Conqueror/Liberator of Orgrimmar; both of which aren’t available to be earned within Flexible or Raid Finder difficulty.

This change will take effect tomorrow after the scheduled maintenance.

Below are additional clarifications from Lead Encounter Designer Watcher.

How will this affect Heroic realm firsts?

As for realm firsts, realm firsts are guild achievements; you need to be in a guild group, which is by definition 8/10 or 20/25 members coming from a single guild on a single server. You could theoretically have a couple of guests from a different server and still claim the realm first, but ultimately 80% of the group still has to be from the same guild.

How this will affect loot and lockouts?

As for loot and lockout, nothing about this affects either of those. Loot is not personal in Normal/Heroic; the exact loot setting depends on the raid leader, as always. As for lockouts, Normal lockouts will continue to prevent you from entering a raid in which a boss is alive that you've already killed during a given week. Heroic still uses fixed lockouts, and once you're saved to one Heroic ID, you cannot zone into any different Heroic ID that week.

Current-tier Mythic raiding in Warlords will still be limited to players from a single server. In the meantime, though, this change may help guilds that are trying to recruit and grow in preparation for Mythic raiding.

Comments

Comment by Destruktio

on 2014/03/20 13:58:51

So basically players moving from casualplay to raiding feel and get less reward.

Comment by Burzolog

on 2014/03/20 14:48:54

I'm pretty sure those female dwarf images are exactly the same as the ones that went up a month ago. If they are different, I think I'd need to see a side-by-side comparison to figure out what was changed.

Edit: Ok, now I definitely see new images. It looks to me like they're showing off more facial expressions.

Comment by Kanariya

on 2014/03/20 14:53:26

Cool but the female dwarf model didn't really need any tweaks.

Gnome faces are what need tweaks.. significant tweaks.

Comment by Adoxe

on 2014/03/20 14:57:12

You barely notice the difference, but it is different.

Comment by Cielos

on 2014/03/20 15:03:45

I don't have a problem with cross-realm raiding, as it solves many problems with recruiting and downing content for my guild. I really hope they keep it in for WoD.

Comment by Thelichbeef

on 2014/03/20 18:14:23

Yeah cross-realm raiding is o.k. although there needs to be faster ques. for the normal oq

Comment by Arraya

on 2014/03/20 18:56:03

I can see female dwarves kind of look more serious now, instead of looking like they were high and drunk xD

Comment by tachase

on 2014/03/20 19:08:23

Any source for the new dwarf renders/screens? WoD website seems to be identical to the last time I checked it and not seeing anything new.

Comment by 00Raiser

on 2014/03/20 19:32:08

Looks good I'm enjoying all the new models so far just sad I'm too broke at the moment to pre-order anything XD

Comment by Jazzycakes2

on 2014/03/20 22:13:35

Dem hands

Comment by Nebet

on 2014/03/21 03:29:33

If the images above and the WoD site aren't showing the new still images for you, do a Ctrl+F5 to completely reload the page. The old and new versions were using the same URL, so some users have had the old images loading from their browser cache instead of the new ones.

Comment by oomu

on 2014/03/21 03:59:32

No

New female gnome face is cute and expressive. Keep it.

Comment by wrongheaded

on 2014/03/21 14:42:13

So basically players moving from casualplay to raiding feel and get less reward.

Good. When I raid, I want to raid with people who are there because they enjoy raiding - not because they just want epics. I'd love for raid gear to be available entirely through solo play, because then we could weed out all the grumps, cheats, leeches, and other unpleasant people who ruin raiding for the rest of us.

Comment by wrongheaded

on 2014/03/21 14:43:13

No

New female gnome face is cute and expressive. Keep it.

It's mostly OK, there are just a few times where the face gets kind of uncanny valley-y. I think it's the lips, they need to tone those down a bit.

Comment by shamanfang

on 2014/03/22 07:11:43

whenever you have a problem with how sizeable the Dwarf girl's hands are, just remember that in the lore, both genders of that race often sported full facial beards. And were nigh indistinguishable from one another by an elf. (Vereesa Windrunner)

who cares if she looks like she can throttle a furbolg and win.

Comment by BosephHeyden

on 2014/03/22 15:38:50

Is it hurting raiding guilds? No, because all the good raiding guilds cleared Hellscream a few months back and are waiting for Warlords. This is what they needed to add for everyone else who decided to stick around to kill Garrosh once in regular while he was current content.

Comment by ken2445

on 2014/03/22 17:45:40

I will bet my account they wont add any more character models. I think they will scrap the whole thing. I have never seen devs finish any project. I have no confidence they will start now.

Comment by Adamsm

on 2014/03/22 17:57:11

I will bet my account they wont add any more character models. I think they will scrap the whole thing. I have never seen devs finish any project. I have no confidence they will start now.